Google today announced they are introducing a new feature to its search results focused on delivering ‘in-depth articles’ to users who are searching to learn about broad topics.
Google states “10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. Topics like stem cell research, happiness, and love, to name just a few. That’s why over the next few days we’ll be rolling out a new feature to help you find relevant in-depth articles in the main Google Search results. ” This move is certainly is relevant for the construction industry.
Specifiers looking for in-depth articles on product performance & specifications comes to mind here.
It will certainly be interesting over the next few days to see the quality of content which appears in the ‘in-depth articles’ results pages for searches to do with building products. I’m predicting articles from the designingbuildings.co.uk website appearing in a lot of search results. Good for them, there’s some excelling content on that site if you haven’t checked it out already. All they’ll need to is mark up their content/pages for search engines.
Mark up? What do you mean ‘mark up’?
Well, Google has already stated that necessary steps will need to be carried out to identify pages which are classed as ‘in-depth articles’.
Firstly, you’ll need to add ‘article schema‘ markup to content. Below is an example of ‘rating schema’ which us used on pages which have been rated or reviewed.
Secondly, provide authorship markup. Make sure your blog authors have pics and are on Google+!
Thirdly, if you have long articles over many pages then you’ll need to add rel=next and rel=prev markup. More info here if you want to know what this is.
Fourthly, pages will need to marked up with rel=publisher. Basically a logo added to the listing as you see above for the likes of Guardian and Wall Street Journal. I’ve yet to see the likes of Construction News and Building make more of markups and authorship.
And finally, probably the most important step……create compelling in-depth and unique content for your audience.
We will certainly be marking up all of our articles in our My Digital Insider series as they are of value, unique and in-depth.
Nice post Pritesh,
It’s definitely something that companies need to be aware of and making use of.
We’ve also been looking at the Twitter ‘summary’ and ‘product’ cards which work in a similar way; by adding some markup to your website, you can have a nice image and summary attached to Tweets of a blog post for example.
Even more interesting, I think, are the ‘product’ cards, which allow you to include specific product data. Building product manufacturers would be very clever to use these to Tweet details of their products.
Yes, Twitter cards are useful. Not seen many companies using them although I’m not much of a Twitter web user to notice any.
I think page markup is something which is still relatively new and hopefully should see a few more marketers requesting page markup for new websites or redesigns.